


Memories of failure

by ChristyLN



Category: 2P Hetalia - Fandom, Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-04-09
Packaged: 2018-06-01 03:36:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6499273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChristyLN/pseuds/ChristyLN
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After sensing that something is wrong with his brother, Flavio's worry gets him to go over there for a visit. However, the Luciano he finds there is nothing at all like the normal very self-confident and proud brother that he is used to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memories of failure

Flavio Vargas looked disoriented up at the sky, as a bird suddenly flew over his head. The blond Italian was walking the well-known rote over to his little brother’s house. So well-known in fact that he didn’t have to think about where to stop and where to turn. His feet automatically knew the way, which gave space for the Italian’s mind to wander off, without having to worry about getting lost. At the moment though, his mind was not far away from the actual destination in which he was going. He was thinking about his little brother. Worrying about him to be more exact. The worry had found its way into his heart earlier that afternoon, when Flavio had called his brother out of shear habit. Most of the times the blond had no business behind his calls, he simply just wanted to talk with his brother. These days they mostly only met when having to talk business about their country, and Luciano would usually leave the second he felt like the meeting was over. This was, according to Flavio, far too short time to be in the company of his little brother. However, since he knew how busy Luciano always was, he wouldn’t stress him even more by demanding that the two of them spent time together out in the city or somewhere else. He had come to accept that the phone calls would be the primary form of communication between the two of them for now. When he called, he would usually either start to talk about his own day or asking Luciano about his. The former being way more easier than the latter. Luciano Vargas was a very closed-off person, to put it lightly, and he never did anything unless he could see a point in during it. Whenever his brother would call, he would always start the conversation by asking if it was going to be about something important. When Flavio hereafter informed him that he just wanted to talk, the younger Italian would quickly grow tired of the conversation and usually only answer with short or one-word sentences. However, he would always dedicate at least a small amount of his time to his older brother’s enjoyment of small talk.

The only exception being this early afternoon, when Flavio once again had called in the hope of hearing a bit from his beloved brother. Almost before he had even gotten a chance to open his mouth, his brother had harshly informed him that he was way too busy to talk. The unmistakable bibbing sound of a phone conversation being disconnected had reached Flavio’s ear only a few seconds later. He had put the phone back with a frown on his face, annoyed by his brother’s rudeness and attitude. However, he had soon started to really think about it, and had remembered a slight desperation in the other’s voice. A desperation that immediately had sent a sting of worry through the blond’s heart. It hadn’t been more than a few minutes of inner debating, before Flavio had gotten up from his chair and walked out of the front door. He knew that he was probably just being silly, but something inside of him told him to go and check up on his brother anyway.

 

After some time he finally entered his brother’s house, praising himself for having been smart enough to talk Luciano into give him an extra key. As soon as he had stepped inside, he felt himself being completely surrounded by darkness. Even though he knew that Luciano had a preference for darkness, it still made Flavio kinda eerie. A feeling, which only was made worse by the uncanny silence of the house. After having closed the door behind him and turned on some light, Flavio stood still in the entrance trying to locate some form of noise. Nothing but dead silence met him, however. The blond sighed and started to look around, growing more and more worried after every empty room he entered. It was first when he wandered upstairs that the older brother saw a sign of life in the house. The first thing that met him was the small sound of a tiny piece of glass being shattered under his boot. He looked down in shock, only to discover that multiple pieces of glass lied messily around on the floor, the source seemingly being some kind of bottle, which had been thrown against the wall. Flavio stood for a moment, staring at the glass with an expression of horror painted over his face. He knew his brother had a bad temper, but this seemed to be a little extreme. At this moment, the blond just hoped that his brother’s anger hadn’t resulted in himself getting hurt in some way. By glancing further down the hallway, he noticed that the door to Luciano’s workroom stood slightly ajar. A bit of light seemed to shine out from inside the room, giving the Italian a good clue about where his younger brother was. Quietly, and carefully to not step on any more glass, Flavio walked over and looked inside the room. From what he could see from his position in the doorway, the only light source in the room came from a desk lamp standing on top of Luciano’s preferred writing desk. Flavio’s glance soon fell on his brother, who was sitting by the desk with his back turned to him. The younger brother made no indication that he had noticed the other’s presence, which Flavio knew couldn’t be true. It seemed like his brother always knew when people was looking at him, no matter how much they tried to hide it. Still, the only movement that came from the figure sitting by the desk was small, sudden twitches.

 “Luci?” Flavio asked, as he silently pushed the door open a bit further, allowing himself to enter through it. He had expected to be cut off after the first word, and was deeply surprised when not a single reaching came from the figure, sitting there just under the glow of the desk lamp. As he walked over to the figure by the desk, the blond quickly discovered that the mess that was in this room far surpassed what he had seen out in the hallway. It looked like a tornado had come through the window wrecked the place completely.

“Luci, are you--?“ He stopped when he finally was close enough to see his brother’s face.

Luciano was staring down at the wooden desk, his eyes telling stories about desperation that words would never be able to express. He was grinding his teeth in anger, while his right hand was clutching one of his beloved knives so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. Flavio hadn’t seen him look this bad in years. It truly shocked him to see the man, who normally came off as having an almost unhealthy amount of confidence, just sitting there, looking like nothing more than a broken doll. Of course, Flavio knew that Luciano did have his fair share of problems, however he never let anybody see them. Not even his own brother.

Without saying a word, Flavio walked the last couple of steps over to his brother and hugged him the best he could from the side, burying his head in the others shoulder by doing so. He stood like that for minutes. Patiently he waited for Luciano’s tensed muscles to relax and for his body to stop twitching. When he felt that his little brother finally started to calm, Flavio carefully put one of his hands on top of his brother’s holding the knife, as to silently tell him that it was alright to let go. As if encouraged by the other’s hand, Luciano slowly relaxed his fingers and let them separate, causing the knife to fall down beside him on the wooden desk.

“I told you, I was busy”. A sudden mumble came from the younger Italian. His voice wasn’t hard as Flavio had expected it to be. Just cold. Cold and monotone like the voice you would expect from a person without a single humanly emotion in their body.

Flavio didn’t answer at first. He wasn’t even sure what to say. The worry that had filled him before entering his brother’s house had drastically increased in strength. It was as if an infecting had spread throughout his entire body. He had only seen Luciano like this a couple of times before in his life, and it was never a good sign. Flavio knew this, despite never having gained access to his brother’s thoughts. He wasn’t allowed to know what was going on inside of Luciano’s mind. The younger Italian had made that very clear on numerous occasion. However, after having taking another look at the man in front of him, Flavio knew he had to try once again to make Luciano let him help. No matter if he liked it or not.

“Come with me,” Flavio said, and took a step back to give Luciano some space to stand up. When the other didn’t make as much as a single movement, Flavio sighed and repeated himself. Since he knew he wouldn’t be able to force Luciano to move, he simply had to wait until his brother was ready to stand.

After some time Luciano finally stood up slowly and looked around in the room, completely avoiding eye contact with his older brother. Flavio chose not to comment on this, but instead simply just led him over to the old couch standing in the other end of the room and got him to sit down there. The blond had decided that he was going to try and figure out what was wrong, instead of just taking the easy way out and ignore the unknown problem. And seeing how this was the only way they could be in the same eye-level without having to leave the room and find somewhere else to be – a process which Flavio was sure was going to be extremely difficult at the moment – he decided with himself that the couch would do.

“Luci, what is wrong?” He asked, as he sat down beside the other Italian. The concern in his voice was clear for anyone to hear.

Silence.

“Luciano, please” Flavio tried again, his words sounding more like begging than anything else at this moment.

After having sat in silence for multiple minutes and with no sign of his brother thinking about a way to answer his question, Flavio stood up without a word and slowly walked back over to the writing desk. For a second, the blond’s glance was on the knife, which Luciano had been holding before. While he was looking down at it, he noticed something from the corner of his eye, which caught his attention. On the other end of the desk lied two pieces of paper. After closer inspection, it turned out to be book pages, which looked like they had been violently torn out of their original book. Confused, Flavio took another look around in the dark room, and it was only now that he noticed a messy pile of books, lying on the floor beside the writing desk. He turned his attention back to the pages, and picked them up to get a closer look at it. Both of them seemed to be the first page of a new chapter, though according to the different writing style, they didn’t come from the same book. The first page Flavio had to look at for some time, not really understanding what he was supposed to get from it. The dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Flavio wasn’t sure how this would have any interest to his brother. With a puzzled expression, he switched the pages around to get a look at the other one. The moment his eyes fell on it, a slight sign escaped his lips. This page clearly belong to a book chapter all about the Austrian rule over Northern Italy. Luciano rarely spook of the time he as a child had been ruled over by Austria, and the only times he did was when he felt the need to rage about the other nation. For someone who claimed that dwelling over the past was unnecessary and a waste of time, it baffled Flavio why Luciano would let a couple a history facts affect him like that. There was no doubt in Flavio’s mind that it was the pages, which had sent Luciano into his current state.

Still with the pages in hand, Flavio walked back to his brother and sat down beside him, however Luciano did nothing to acknowledge his presence. He had barely moved at all since Flavio had placed him on the couch, and he did nothing to show that he knew what the blond had just found, though Flavio found it highly unlikely that Luciano wasn’t aware of it. For a couple of seconds Flavio just sat there, hoping with all of his heart that his brother would turn and look at him, so that they could talk. Nothing happened. Luciano’s eyes were fixated to the floor with no sign of moving away from it in the nearest future.

“I found these on your desk, Luci,” Flavio said, as he made a small movement to show the pages even though Luciano still wasn’t looking at him. “I’m not sure I understand what it means…but I want to”. At this point, the blond’s voice had gotten even softer than before, as if he was just talking to himself rather than Luciano. It saddened him how bad the two of them was at talking to each other. Really talking. Sometimes it almost felt like the two of them wasn’t even related at all. This was something that Flavio hated with all of his heart, while also blaming himself for having let it come to this. 

“Why?” Flavio snapped out of his own thoughts, when he suddenly heard his brother’s voice. Even though Luciano still wasn’t looking at him, it was clear that Flavio now had his full attention.

“Because you mean a lot to me,” Flavio started, hoping that Luciano would understand the truthfulness that laid behind those words. “Because you are my brother”.

“I’m just fucking tired of being too weak!” The abrupt outburst made Flavio jump a bit and he suddenly found himself looking directly at his brother, who had turned his head to Flavio dead in the eyes.

Flavio had no idea what to say. It was as if every word in his vocabulary had left him, leaving him with no way of expression, how he felt. Of course, he knew how Luciano felt about weakness. He had expressed that towards Flavio multiple times, when telling him how his way of thinking and acting weakened him. Knowing how much pride his brother felt towards himself, the blond had been convinced that Luciano saw himself as having no weakness at all.

“Stop looking at me like that!” Luciano yelled. Since he hadn’t answered, Flavio had for a couple of seconds just looked at him with pity in his eyes. This seemed to have triggered something inside of Luciano’s mind, and his eyes were almost glowing with hatred.

“I’m sorry,” Flavio said with a low voice, as he turned his head away from his brother. His heart was filled with regret and fury towards himself, thinking about how even though he had tried to help, he had managed to make Luciano angry.

He expected to hear more from Luciano, however when nothing came the blond carefully turned to look at the other Italian, only to see that he was again was staring down at the floor. Even though he felt like, he had already had messed up completely, something inside of Flavio told him not to just give up. He had to at least try and make his little brother feel better. He just had to. Slowly, Flavio stretched out his arm and put a hand on Luciano’s shoulder, which quickly shaken off.

“Luci, you need to listen to me”. At this point Flavio had turned completely to face Luciano, trying his best to get eye contact, though it didn’t work. "I know how it is to be weak, you know I do, but the thing is that that is not all that matters. The cold hard fact is that you cannot win every time. No one is able to do that. Losing is a part of life, and in the end, that is also what will make you even stronger. The loses you and I have suffered are in the past. It is history, and history is supposed to be a guideline for us, so that we can try and prevent it from happening again. It is not for us to sit down and think about things that could have happened differently. You are not weak for having lost, Luci. But you would be weak, if you let the past stop you from doing great in the presence”.

They silence that followed, felt like it went on forever. Flavio kept looking at his brother, almost sure that he could see the gears moving inside the other’s mind, as he was thinking about Flavio’s words. He had expected some kind of response, but instead Luciano just stood up and looked around the room, before letting out a quiet sigh. After having stared down at the messy pile of books for a couple of seconds, the younger Italian finally spun around to face Flavio.

“Whatever…” The younger Italian mumbled, showing clear signs of annoyance. However, despite the harsh look on his brother’s face, a smile still found its way unto Flavio’s lips. A part of him was sure that he saw a light in those magenta-coloured eyes, which hadn’t been there when he had arrived to the house. He didn’t mind Luciano’s harsh tone all that much, since that was just the way in which his brother coped and moved on. “Why are you still here?” The irritation in Luciano’s voice was obvious as always.

“Oh, well I’m going to stay here for the rest of the day,” Flavio answered with a smirk on his lips. Seeming how his brother had become his old self once again, the blond’s confidence and ego had returned to him as well. He leaned back on the couch, as he watched his little brother turn around and glare at him with a raised eyebrow.

 “You are what?”

“Going to stay here. Someone needs to make sure that you clean up your house up, after all~”.

“You are such an idiot”.

“I love you too, Luci”.  

**Author's Note:**

> The idea and inspiration for this story came from this genius post on Tumblr: http://fallenprussiansoldier.tumblr.com/post/141942390162/i-need-more-of-flavio-being-the-supportive-big-bro


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